If You Were So Inclined, You Could Stick It on a Bumper

Edward Klein’s Invective-Laden Obama Book

“The Amateur” by Edward Klein is a book about an inept, arrogant ideologue who maintains an absurdly high opinion of his own talents even as he blatantly fails to achieve his goals. Oh, and President Obama is in this book too.

Of course Mr. Klein does not see himself as the amateur of his title. As he announces in the very first sentence, “This is a reporter’s book.” It is based on “dozens of four-inch-thick three-ring notebooks” that detail interviews with “nearly 200 people,” some of whom even allowed Mr. Klein to mention their names in print.

And it is written by a man with journalistic credentials. Mr. Klein was editor of The New York Times Magazine from 1977 to 1987, although that won’t get him far with his target audience of readers looking for reasons to feel contempt for the president. He parlayed his familiarity with members of the Kennedy family into a string of maudlin books about them (“Just Jackie: Her Private Years,” “Farewell, Jackie” and “The Kennedy Curse,” among others). He has also written pulp fiction. If Mr. Klein is lucky, “The Obama Identity: A Novel (Or Is It?)” (written in 2010 with John LeBoutillier) will be left out of the chatter that “The Amateur” churns up.

Although President Obama and his advisers have, as Mr. Klein so peculiarly puts it, “gone to elaborate lengths to hide his dark side,” they could not deter this seasoned pro. “I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable,” he writes. Translation: any biographical subject has bitter ex-friends and associates. And if they feel snubbed enough, they will talk. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright asserted to Mr. Klein that during the last presidential election he was offered a bribe by the Obama camp, a payoff to stop speaking in public. Mr. Wright also says that even when Mr. Obama made this request directly, he would not cooperate. Among the reasons: he had speaking engagements scheduled, a family to support and college tuitions to pay.

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William P. O'Donnell/The New York Times

Beyond resurrecting the influence of Mr. Wright, “The Amateur” adds little to the record about Mr. Obama’s past. And although the book repeatedly calls him a failure and a disappointment with regard to domestic affairs, Mr. Klein has no capacity for explaining specifics. He has little to say about Obamacare beyond disapproving of it and labeling it “an enormously complex Rube Goldberg machine” that was poorly presented to the public.

The book’s foreign policy complaints are noisier, especially on what it calls Mr. Obama’s “Jewish problem.” Mr. Klein had no trouble finding angry on-the-record complaints about this administration’s treatment of Israel. He raises questions about whether Mr. Obama’s attempts at an evenhanded approach to the Arab world has reduced American influence there. And while carefully steering clear of the Bush administration’s foreign policy record, he accuses the president of botched, inconsistent handling of the tumultuous Arab Spring.

The personal accusations — that Mr. Obama is aloof, that he has not learned from experience, that he has snubbed former supporters — are nasty but vague. Some are even contradictory. Michelle Obama is presented as both overbearing and lazy. Caroline Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey, Valerie Jarrett and Samantha Power are all presented as aggrieved and, in Ms. Power’s case, demonic. And the photos that accompany “The Amateur” are bizarre enough to include Desirée Rogers, whose track record as the White House’s social secretary is barely mentioned; Al Capone, because he and Mr. Obama both count as Chicagoans; and the famous Situation Room shot of administration members watching the Navy SEAL team’s raid on Osama bin Laden.

Of all the details to notice about this picture, Mr. Klein singles out the fact that Ms. Jarrett, who argued against the raid, isn’t in it. Yet when he talks about a photograph of President Obama bowing to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia he does not compare it to the one of President Bush holding King Abdullah’s hand. The comparison would have been interesting. But all Mr. Klein says is that a bow or curtsy to a foreign monarch is a violation of Miss Manners’s etiquette rules. This skimpy, bitter book is more interested in combining anti-Obama bumper-sticker phrases with very energetic branding, as if hammering home the use of “amateur” as an epithet is all it takes to make the case. His conclusion, in 12 words: “Republicans will have to remind America that Barack Obama is The Amateur.”

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Edward KleinCredit
Sante D'Orazio

Not all of the book is that concise. Mr. Klein describes a soap-operatic 2011 fight between Bill and Hillary Clinton in their home in Chappaqua, N.Y. The writing combines a tiny bit of information with over-the-top histrionics. Bill, his nose red and his fist banging, claims to have secret poll results proving that the president is beatable. (That’s the fact-based part.) He wants his wife to run against Mr. Obama again in 2012. “You can win if you want back in the White House as much as I do,” he says.

“You deserve to be president,” adds their daughter Chelsea.

“What about loyalty, Bill? What about loyalty?” Hillary asks, her eyeballs bulging.

“Barack Obama is an amateur!” Mr. Clinton exclaims.

The witnesses to this scene include Tally, a toy poodle, and Seamus, a chocolate lab and “a few old friends.” It was probably a two-legged individual who talked. (Mr. Clinton has denied the whole incident.)

Mr. Klein later describes Mr. Obama’s meeting with eight well-known male historians and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Again, the vantage point is peculiar. One person at the meeting, Mr. Klein says, was so underwhelmed that this person later had a hush-hush meeting with Mr. Klein, in an unnamed deli outside an unnamed city, to tell him what a disappointment Mr. Obama was. “Not to put too fine a point on it, he’s in over his head,” said the person identified as “the historian,” gender not specified. Both “the historian” and the one woman in the room do sound quite knowledgeable about Lyndon Johnson.

This tactic brings to mind Agatha Christie — whose amateur detective, Miss Marple, Mr. Klein says, was better at her work than Mr. Obama is at his. However, after a book full of invective and much more second- than firsthand information, “The Amateur” winds up threatening that Mr. Obama may be re-elected. It also predicts an ugly campaign. It got that right.

THE AMATEUR

Barack Obama in the White House

By Edward Klein

Illustrated. 277 pages. Regnery Publishing. $27.95.

A version of this review appears in print on May 17, 2012, on page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: If You Were So Inclined, You Could Stick It on a Bumper. Today's Paper|Subscribe